Yeah, like the speech of U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, the fiery conservative who once famously cried, and I’m not kidding, “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!”

I don’t know what that means, either.

The Texas accent is indeed lovely. But anyone who’s heard Texican and Chicagoese side by side knows the truth.

No tongue can match vowels delivered the Chicago Way.

I called on an expert: the eminent theoretical linguist Jerry Sadock, professor emeritus of linguistics from the University of Chicago.

He watched a blasphemous CBS news story on the YouGov survey and was outraged.

"The YouGov survey that CBS based this slander on does not support the conclusion. The survey asked only what the most attractive dialect was, the winner being — get this — Texan,” Sadock wrote in an email.

“Louie Gohmert? Really? The fact that very few respondents found the Chicago accent the most attractive, does not mean that it is the least attractive,” said Sadock. “I prefer to think that would have been rated as the second most attractive accent, if the survey had asked for rankings.”

But they didn’t ask. I hate them now.

Sadock was born in South Shore. I was born in Vis, at 52d and Peoria. His mom is from Canada. So is my mom. When Canadians from Chicago get together, they slip into old speech patterns. They speak Canadian and say “aboot” for “about.”

And when I phoned Sadock, we immediately began speaking Chicagoese. I took some notes.

Sadock..Nhaayt bad (not bad).

Kass: I betcha in the old days in Caayhnada, it cost a dahler to get into a haaacky game.

“I watched some of your videos to make sure you were the real McCoy,” Sadock said. “You speak Chicagoan. I speak Chicagoan.”

In olden times, Chicagoese was shaped by what linguists called the Northern cities vowel shift, from migration to the Great Lakes along the Erie Canal.

“When I was a kid in South Shore, every one of my classmates spoke a version of English that linguistic experts would have instantly recognized as Chicagoan,” Sadock said. “Some people still speak that way, but it is no longer as widespread or as distinct as it was 70 years ago. Radio, TV, and the great mobility of modern Americans are gradually leveling all the various, colorful, local varieties of English in favor of a dull, neutral, standard American.”

That’s sickening. We’re all being scrubbed of our individuality as our vowels are sanded down in the great leveling. Someday most Americans will sound like insipid weathercasters, or scary old men with big teeth on TV demanding that you buy gold.

I’m glad I won’t live to see it.

“Traditional Chicagoan is distinguished by a number of lexical items like washroom, and stoop, and by some grammatical constructions like ‘I'm coming with’ “Sadock said. “But it is the sound of the language that most people pick up on, especially the vowels in words like not and bad. The sentence written ‘That's not bad,’ comes out something like "Thyats nat byad" in my historical dialect.”

And in my dialect, too, Jerry.

The great American leveling of our speech is criminal. Corporatists have encouraged us to scrape the city by the lake off our tongues. This is cultural slaughter.

Sadock insists that speaking Chicagoese is not a barrier to success. He points out that James Watson, who received the Nobel Prize for figuring out the structure of DNA, grew up in Sadock’s old South Shore neighborhood. Sadock was delighted to pick up hints of our mellifluous Chicagoese speech patterns in a Watson lecture.

In his email, Sadock explained that when we talked by phone about our shared linguistic heritage, “my affected, artificial academic speech was quickly replaced by something closer to the lovely language of my youth. Yand thyat's nat byad.”

No, thyat’s nat bad Jer. It’s nat.

But we need Chicago’s preservationists to help preserve that which is worth preserving.